This article was
first published in issue 13, volume 1/2011 of The Dot
Connector Magazine, official publication of Sott.net

"Comets are vile stars. Every time
they appear in the south, they wipe out the old and establish
the new. Fish grow sick, crops fail, Emperors and common people
die, and men go to war. The people hate life and don't even want
to speak of it."

José Macharé - scientist of the Geologic, Mining
and Metallurgic Institute in Perú - said that the space rock fell
near a muddy area by Lake Titicaca, making the water boil for around
ten minutes, and mixing with the soil and emanating a gray cloud,
the components of which remain unknown.

Having discarded radioactive
poisons, this toxic cloud is said to have caused headaches and
respiratory problems in at least 200 persons from a population of
1500 inhabitants.

Other than this event,

How often do we hear about
people getting sick due to a rock coming from space?

How about
birds, fish or other animals?

Ancient astrologers cite comets as ill
omens of death and famine, but are there any other causes other than
the ones due to physical/mechanical consequences of comet impact
devastation in our fragile environment of which we should be aware?

As a physician, I usually concentrate strictly on medical and
health-related issues, not history or catastrophism.

However, like
so many other people, I see signs of atmospheric changes on our
planet which, according to many experts, may well be due to
increasing comet dust loading.

When I read about increasing reports
of fireballs all around the world, and I know that these factors
must have an effect on the health of individuals and societies, it
motivates me to do the research to find the connections so that I am
better prepared for what may lie in our future. If our planet is
entering a new cometary bombardment cycle, and if these comets
harbor new species of microbes unknown to mankind's collective
immunological systems (as may well be the case), then being
forewarned is being forearmed.

According to the late Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe of
the University of Wales at Cardiff, viruses can be distributed
throughout space by dust in the debris stream of comets.

Then as
Earth passes though the stream, the dust and viruses load our
atmosphere, where they can stay suspended for years until gravity
pulls them down. They compare numerous plagues throughout our
history which coincide with cometary bodies in our skies. These
researchers are certain that germs causing plagues and epidemics
come from space.

In a letter to Lancet [1],Wickramasinghe explains that a small
amount of a virus introduced into the stratosphere could make a
first tentative fallout east of the great mountain range of the
Himalayas, where the stratosphere is thinnest, followed by sporadic
deposits in neighboring areas.

Could this explain why new strains of
the influenza virus that are capable of engendering epidemics, and
which are caused by radical genetic mutations, usually originate in
Asia?

Wickramasinghe argues that if the virus is only minimally
infective, the subsequent course of its global progress will depend
on stratospheric transport and mixing, leading to a fallout
continuing seasonally over a few years; even if all reasonable
attempts are made to contain an infective spread, the appearance of
new foci almost anywhere is a possibility.

Mainstream science scoffs at the idea that if there is life such as
bacteria and viruses in space, some of it would naturally fall to
Earth. While some researchers agree that comet dust may harbor
organic matter, they argue that even if the dust did reach Earth's
atmosphere, a fiery entry would make all organic matter's survival
questionable.

But in a study published in the journal
Meteoritics
and Planetary Science[2], it is detailed that amino acids - the
building blocks of life - were found in a meteorite where none were
expected.

Why? Because this particular meteorite formed when two
asteroids collided, the shock of collision heating it to more than
2,000 degrees Fahrenheit - hot enough that all complex organic
molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed.

They found
them anyway, and their study cites the possibility of sample
contamination being highly unlikely. In addition to amino acids,
they found minerals that only form under high temperatures,
indicating that they were indeed forged in a violent collision.

Jennifer Blank of SETI has done experiments with amino acids in
water and ice, showing they can survive pressures and temperatures
comparable to a low-angle comet-Earth impact or asteroid-asteroid
collision.

Ancient Chinese astronomers chronicled numerous episodes where
comets preceded plague and disaster. Meticulous observations were
compiled in 300 B.C. in a textbook known as the "Mawangdui Silk." It
details 29 different cometary forms and the various disasters
associated with them, dating as far back as 1500 B.C.

The Mawangdui silk, depicted 29 different cometary forms

and the
various diseases and disasters associated with them.

Compiled,
beginning around 1500 BC.

Joseph points out that medieval Europe and colonial America are
areas where comets were observed to coincide with plagues and
disease, adding that Comet Encke, the likely origin of
the Tunguska impactor and the 1918 Flu epidemic, also coincide.

He writes:

... in 2005, scientists from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
in Washington, D.C., resurrected the 1918 virus from bodies that had
been preserved in the permanently frozen soil of Alaska.

They soon
discovered that a completely new virus had combined with an old
virus, exchanging and recombining genes, creating a hybrid that
transformed mild strains of the flu virus into forms far more deadly
and pathogenic.

They also confirmed that the
1918 Spanish flu virus
originated in the sky, first infecting birds and then spreading and
proliferating in humans.

Joseph argues that cometary debris, and the smaller particles and
any microbes and viral particles attached to cometary debris
impacting earth, fall upon the upper atmosphere and then slowly
drift upon the air currents, sometimes staying aloft for years,
crisscrossing the planet and gently falling downward, until finally
making a soft landing on whatever is beneath them - be it ocean,
river, animal, plant, or woman and man.

In fact, it is known that
microorganisms exist in significant concentrations in Earth's
atmosphere, and they have been found in air samples collected at
heights ranging from 41 km to 77 km. The natural mechanisms which
transport microorganisms into the atmosphere are storms, volcanoes,
monsoons, and cometary impact events.

We know that the Tunguska object exploded in the atmosphere in June
1908, but it was not until 1927 when scientists finally made it to
the impact area in Siberia. No visible fragments of the exploded
body were found, but later fieldwork uncovered peculiar black,
shiny, metallic spheres in the soil of numerous small, shallow, oval
craters - 50 to 200 meters in diameter - similar to the craters of
the Carolina Bays.

These spheres were typical of extraterrestrial
bodies having a composition very high in iridium, nickel, cobalt and
other metals, and an unusually high content of these same metals
were later found in Antarctic ice cores - but in the layer relating
to the year 1912. [4]

That is to say, it took four years for these
metals deposited in the stratosphere to precipitate onto Earth.

Was
the Tunguska object a source of new strains of virus never seen
before on Earth?

A study conducted near the Tunguska Phenomenon site found
significant concentrations of culturable microorganisms in the skies
of southwestern Siberia, at an altitude range of 0.5-7 km, a range
similar to the height of 5-10 km where the Tunguska Space Body
interacted with Earth's atmosphere. [5]

Joseph reminds us that microbes which flourish in the cold are this
planet's most successful colonizers.

In fact, they are perfectly
adapted to a life on some frozen astral object traveling through
space.

"The long-term impact of subzero temperatures should be
regarded not as extreme and limiting but rather as a stabilizing
factor supporting the viability of microorganisms".

Supporting this, it is known that Richard Hoover of NASA discovered
microorganisms in deep ancient ice cores over 4,000 years old,
drilled from Lake Vostok, near
the South Pole.

These creatures were
found in association with ancient cosmic dust particles which had
fallen from space. Moreover, microbes recovered from Lake Vostok
increase in number with increasing numbers of dust particles (S.
Abyzov et al., Microbiologiya, 1998, 67: 547).[3]

Joseph and Wickramasinghe have also reviewed and provided evidence
that microbes can travel from planet to planet and solar system to
solar system encased in asteroids, comets and other stellar debris,
and that they can survive the impact and heat of ejection and
reentry into the atmosphere.

They argue that microbes and viruses can exchange and acquire DNA,
and this argument is supported by a recent study published in Nature
Communications [7] which sheds light on how bacteria incorporate
foreign DNA from invading viruses into their own regulatory
processes.

Thomas Wood, professor in the Artie McFerrin Department
of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, explains how
viruses replicate themselves by invading bacterial cells and
integrating themselves into the chromosomes of the bacteria.

When
this happens, a bacterium makes a copy of its chromosome, which
includes the virus particle. The virus can then choose at a later
time to replicate itself, killing the bacterium.

Having already
integrated itself into the bacterium's chromosome, the virus is
subject to mutation as well.

The Black Death Revisited
The
Black Death moved relentlessly northwards through Europe like a
giant wave.

Its progress was very rapid in the early stages, from
December 1347 to June 1348, when it spread through Italy and France,
Spain and the Balkans. Crossing the Alps and Pyrenees, it eventually
reached Sweden, Norway, and the Baltic by December 1350. Many
villages were completely depopulated and disappeared, but the
progression of the disease included zones of total avoidance as
well.

The Black Death stayed in Europe for the next
three centuries,
disappearing finally in the seventeenth century in 1670 when it was
apparently at the peak of its power.

Inspired by Black Death, The Dance of Death is an allegory on the
universality of death

and a common painting motif in late medieval
period.

Why did it appear, spread, and disappear as it did?

A new and unique
virus formed under conditions facilitated by cosmic impacts could be
lethal to a population that is not previously immunized (here,
natural immunity is intended) against it. But as immunization is
acquired within a population, the course of the disease or the
disease itself can change.

There is compelling evidence that the Black Death was not an
outbreak of bubonic plague, but was in fact caused by a hemorrhagic
virus.

This case is synthesized in the book
Return of the Black
Death[8], in which Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan from
Liverpool University carefully put all the available clues together,
tracking the plague from its first appearance out of nowhere and
chronicling its unprecedented catastrophic effects on European
civilization - death on a scale that is unimaginable, but could very
well happen again, at any time.

Studying the parish records and the historical data registered in
English provinces, using information about the critical events in
the lives of real people and computer modeling, Duncan and Scott
were able to not only surmise the amount of time from the appearance
of symptoms to death, but also to establish the following facts
about the pandemic:

An outbreak is recorded as being started by a traveler or stranger
or by an inhabitant who had returned from a place where the plague
was known to be raging.

The plague behaved in exactly the same way in each outbreak.

There were, however, two different types of epidemics in England,
governed by size and density of the population.

The full-blown typical epidemic lasted for eight or nine months -
from spring to December.

The mortality rate was often about 40% of the population, although
they had no measure of how many people had fled at the first signs
of trouble.

Not only that, they were also able to establish these vital
statistics of the plague:

Latent period: 10 to 12 days

Infectious period before appearance of symptoms: 20 to 22 days

Incubation period: 32 days

Average period displaying symptoms before death: 5 days

Total infectious period: about
27 days, assuming that the victim remained infectious until
death, although it is possible that infectiousness decreased
once the symptoms appeared

Average time from the point of infection to death: 37 days

The authors were astonished when they were able to work out the
duration of these statistics in more than 50 different plague
outbreaks in England and to verify the length of the latent and
infectious periods many times.

The correspondence with the universal
40-day "quarantine" period established as successful prophylaxis
during the time of the plague supported their conclusions. From the
data available in other countries, they argue convincingly that
these statistics applied to the Black Death in all of Europe.

It was
evident that the key to the success of the plague in the Middle Ages
lay in its exceptionally long incubation period.

Every infectious disease has an incubation period which spans from
the time when a person is infected to when the first symptoms
appear, and an infectious period which is the time during which the
person can transmit the infection to other people. The infection is
followed by a latent period during which germs multiply until the
victim becomes infectious.

If this latent period is shorter than the
incubation period, an infected person will be infectious before the
symptoms appear and he or she may unknowingly transmit the disease
to others.

Eventually, the disease runs its course in the body and
for the infection to persist, it must have infected at least one
other person.

Among the plague symptoms there were accounts of the following:

A victim usually displayed the symptoms for about five days before
dying. But according to contemporary accounts, this period could
have been between two to twelve days.

The main diagnostic feature was the appearance of hemorrhagic
spots, often red, but ranging in color from blue to purple and from
orange to black. They often appeared on the chest, but were also
seen on the throat, arms and legs and were caused by bleeding under
the skin from damaged capillaries. These were so-called "God's
tokens".

Various swellings were also characteristic of the disease:
carbuncles, blains (burning ulcers) and the the buboes, which were
swollen lymph glands in the neck, armpits and groin. If the buboes
failed to rise and burst, there was little chance of survival, but
if they broke the fever apparently declined.

Fever, continual vomiting, diarrhea, and prolonged bleeding from
the nose were additional characteristics. Also, blood-tinged urine,
a burning thirst, and in some, madness and delirium.

Autopsies revealed generalized necrosis of the internal organs. It
was surely a gruesome way to die. The victim was killed by the
literal death and liquefaction of the organs.

Since nobody had been exposed to the disease before, almost everyone
who made effective contact with an infectious person caught the
disease and died, but there were reports of a few people who
apparently had a natural protection against this new disease.

Could
their ancestors have been exposed to a similar plague in the past?

Or did they carry particular mutations that made them immune or
their immune system strong enough to fight such a disease?

Illustration of the Black Death

from the Toggenburg Bible (1411).

What about the bubonic plague?Against all odds, the bubonic plague was universally and
unequivocally believed to be the cause of the Black Death, despite
the fact that it is well-established as biologically impossible.

Bubonic plague is a disease carried by rodents and its infection is
transmitted to people from rats by fleas. The infectious agent is
Yersinia pestis.

Some rats are highly vulnerable and die, whereas
others are resistant and can survive an infection. This is a key
concept, since the disease will die out if all rats are highly
vulnerable, whereas it will persist in areas where there is a
balance between susceptible and resistant rats.

Scott and Duncan explain how
Yersinia pestis has never persisted in
any European rodents because they are not resistant. In addition to
that, the only species of rats in Europe came either some 60 years
after the last European plague or could not survive without a warm
climate, making it impossible to spread infection rapidly and wildly
in winter.

They argue that:

... it is known that the Black Death was carried across the sea to
Iceland and that there were two severe and well-authenticated
epidemics in the fifteenth century. [...] Yet it is known that no
rats were present on the island during the three centuries of the
Black Death.

Infections continued through the winter when the
average temperature was below -3 degrees Celsius, where transmission
by fleas is impossible.

It is also agreed that there is no mention
in any of the accounts of rat mortality during the Black Death. A
temperature of between 18 degrees and 27 degrees Celsius and
relative humidity of 70% are ideal for flea egg-laying, whereas
temperatures below 18 degrees inhibit it.

Researchers had collected
all the available climatological data for central England during the
Black Death and at no time was the average July-August temperature
above 18.5 degrees Celsius.

Britain, much less Iceland or Sweden, did not have a climate capable
of sustaining regular seasonal outbreaks of flea-borne bubonic
plague.

Right from the beginning, the people of medieval Europe
realized that it was an infectious disease spread directly from one
person to another, not a disease associated with, or coming from,
rats.

There are two forms of bubonic plague in humans: bubonic and
pneumonic. Patients with bubonic plague are not contagious to other
people. Pneumonic plague is contagious, appearing in about 5% of
cases of bubonic plague; that is, it cannot occur in the absence of
the bubonic form and it cannot persist independently. It happens
when the bacterium reaches the lungs, and the time from infection to
death of bubonic/pneumonic plague is 5 days, not 37 days.

Scott and Duncan note certain factors that narrow the causative
agent of the Black Death down to a virus.

The infectious agent also
appeared to have been remarkably stable; if there were mutations,
these didn't change the course of the disease, at least not for 300
years. The plague was believed to have been passed by droplet
infection; it was considered to be safe if one kept at least 4
meters (13 feet) away from an infected person out-of-doors.

Most
interesting of all, there exists a strong genetic selection among
European populations in favor of the
CCR5-Δ32 mutation. This
mutation results in the genetic deletion of a portion of the CCR5
gene which codes for a protein that is an entry port used by some
viruses.

This mutation makes a homozygous carrier resistant to HIV-1
virus infections, and may have made them resistant to the Black
Death.

No known virus existing today is responsible for the Black Death,
although the symptoms resemble those of Ebola, Marburg and the viral
hemorrhagic fevers - diseases caused by
filoviruses. They have a
high mortality rate and tend to occur in explosive epidemics driven
by person-to-person transmission. Outbreaks occur unpredictably and,
as of yet, no animal reservoir is known.

Similar plagues have been described in antiquity, i.e. the
devastating
epidemic that struck Athens in 430 BC and which Joseph
and Wickramasinghe suggest the causative agent of which to be
cometary as well.[9]

As with the Black Death, the epidemic in Athens
was localized geographically, it declined and disappeared as
abruptly as it had started, and no known current disease fits its
description by the historian Thucydides.

A scene showing monks, disfigured by the plague,

being blessed by a
priest. England, 1360–75.

Where did these diseases go? Did the Black Death virus mutate,
causing other fearsome diseases?

What we do know is that a more
virulent form of smallpox came to the fore in the 1630s and, just as
the Black Death disappeared from the stage of history, smallpox took
its place as the most feared of human diseases. We can only
speculate.

Smallpox virus, as opposed to the causative agent of the
Black death, is very resistant to cold temperatures, making it a
more viable virus.

According to the data collected by Scott and
Duncan which describe the disease process of the Black Death,
hemorrhagic smallpox is almost virtually identical to the Black
Death.

Plague outbreaks often
coincided against a background of food shortages, famines, flooding,
peasant uprisings and religious wars. In certain countries, there
were volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and famines. And not only did
the plague outbreaks coincide with cometary impacts, but earthquakes
themselves may well have been indications of cometary impacts.

Baillie compared tree rings to dated ice-core samples that had been
analyzed, discovering ammonium. Now, there is a connection between
the ammonium in the ice cores and extra-terrestrial bombardment of
the surface of the Earth on at least four occasions in the last 1500
years:

Baillie shows
that the exact same signature is present at the time of the Black
Death in both the tree rings and in the ice cores, but also at other
times of so-called "plagues and pandemics".

Baillie points out that
earthquakes could be caused by cometary explosions in the atmosphere
or even by impacts on the surface of the earth. In fact, the
ammonium signal in the ice-cores is directly connected to an
earthquake that occurred on January 25th, 1348.

He correlates this
with accounts of the 14th century that the plague was "corruption of
the atmosphere" that came from this earthquake.

Comet of 1681.

The concept of astral bodies grazing the Earth's atmosphere or
impacting Earth directly, depositing microbes and viruses on Earth
which may combine with Earthly microbes producing new strains of
viruses and contributing to evolution and diseases, is daunting to
say the least.

What can we possibly do to counteract such infectious
threats? Could dietary changes influence the appearance and
disappearance of diseases?

We know that the period between c. 500 and 1300 saw a major change
in diet that affected most of Europe, a period preceding the Black
Death. More intense agriculture on ever-increasing acreage resulted
in a shift from meat to various grains and vegetables as the staple
of the majority of the population.

Meat was more expensive and
therefore more prestigious and, usually in the form of wild game,
was common only on the tables of the nobility which, according to
some of the accounts, was hardly affected by the Black Death.

So it
very well may be that meat consumption is a nutritional protection
against diseases of various kinds, including the Black Death (the
Paleolithic archaeological record certainly supports this idea).

We know that grains are sources of gluten, a protein which is quite
difficult to digest and to which increasing numbers of people are
intolerant due to its modern hybridization for industrial purposes.
Anti-nutrients such as
lectins in grains are known to be toxic.

The lectin of wheat is known to be pro-inflammatory, immunotoxic,
neurotoxic, cytotoxic, cardiotoxic and may interfere with gene
expression, disrupt endocrine function, may adversely affect
gastrointestinal function and - surprise - lectins share pathogenic
similarities with certain viruses.[11]

A population with bread as a
staple food is unquestionably susceptible to disease and,
ultimately, pandemic.
As it was then, we are nowadays just as vulnerable due to the
industrialization of our food supply.

Nutritionally deficient foods,
plus widespread cereal consumption, added to the overwhelming
toxicity of our environment (heavy metals, fluoride, toxic additives
in foods, etc), have prepared us as the perfect population for
destruction by the return of the Black Death.